This is prompted by a comment in the thread about Ralphie's new CD Eloise (highly recommended, by the way). Someone commented that when they ripped the CD to hard drive there was no digital information about the CD, the artist or track names. Ralphie, despite his expertise as a sound engineer, admitted that he had no idea how to go about including this information.

As I'm about to go into the studio to record my band's first CD I'm curious to know too. Can anyone explain how this information is included?

I'd do it with cdrdao, which is a command line program that reads a text file (called the toc-file) containing a precise description of exactly what's on the CD. It's brilliant for all those tricky things like track numbers that change in the middle of the music, non-standard gaps between tracks, CDs with mixed music and CD-ROM content, bonus tracks and CD-TEXT. Getting the toc-file right is tricky, though.